[Ed. The next EMEA Brainstorm is in London next week from Weds 11th to Friday 13th May, covering cloud, online video, digital entertainment, mobile internet, M2M, Apps, strategy, transformation, and personal data. See you there!]

After last week’s Amazonopocalypse, the clean-up effort is well under way, as are the recriminations. Amazon Web Services’ own report into the outage is here, basically confirming the view the last Telco 2.0 Review took on it. It seems that an internal router got misconfigured, dumping all the primary network traffic into a secondary network, which was swamped. That in turn led to a cascade failure of the control plane which manages the Elastic Block Service across multiple availability zones. Read it for much technical detail about the problems of really big cloud architectures.

It looks like Amazon is undertaking a considerable effort to explain more about the fundamentals of their systems to applications developers - their new Architecture Centre will be holding a succession of conferences on how to design services to work well with AWS. There’s more How I Won the War content here and here - the general tone of shock that AWS Availability Zones aren’t anywhere near as independent as advertised seems to be the same everywhere.

Jeff Atwood notes that Netflix, one of the heaviest AWS users to survive, uses a program called “Chaos Monkey” to randomly turn things off in order to test their systems’ stability. There’s a timely presentation on their architecture here. High Scalability’s list of articles is still being updated, but although there’s lots of How I Won the War out there, there are relatively few How We Completely Failed to Cope pieces - which is surely a missed opportunity.

Last Friday’s UK Royal Wedding led to very heavy video streaming over the Internet. As a result, this classic NANOG discussion ensued on the challenges of Internet TV, the practicalities of running IP Multicast at very high scale, and the surprisingly complicated ways in which a very sensible technical solution interfaces with the law as regards the contracts between TV stations, content providers, and advertisers.

It seems that a major barrier in global multicast deployment - which everyone agrees would be a huge step towards solving the problems of delivering online video - is that TV stations want to count viewers and the terms of existing contracts enforce that this be done in a way analogous to cable TV. Who knew? There’s obviously an opportunity here.

The death of Osama Bin Laden lead to a very different global TV event this weekend that could have posed performance issues for major video-streaming Web sites. ZDNet UK has a detailed post on technical solutions for live video streaming of this event to its specific and very particular customer group.

Akamai reported that it caused very high levels of traffic, but nothing compared to those achieved during the 2010 World Cup. It looks like the global public prefers football to either monarchy or war, which is probably good news for the future of humanity.

Here’s some M2M news: in Australia, someone stole the USIM from a smart electricity meter and ran up hundreds of thousands of Aussie dollars’ worth of calls. Why voice calls were even provisioned is an interesting question - as is just what Telstra was charging the utility company for its connectivity. That’s a lot of calls. The case, as they say, continues. (In comments, someone asks what would happen if the thief swapped an ordinary retail SIM into the meter…)

In other Australian news, Vodafone is trying to patch up after the outages by offering everyone 12 hours of free SMS.

There is speculation that the hackers might have been able to control the update process and might have intended to use a botnet of PlayStations to attack SSL keys.

Meanwhile, RIM issued a profit warning, as sales were both disappointing and skewed towards cheaper devices. A general sense of tension was apparent. However, very early reports on PlayBook sales were good. There’s more at ATD, but it’s worth pointing out that we’re still in the “going to shops and looking” phase.

Phone Scoopreviewed the new Bold 9900 and was impressed. Its new OS is apparently now to be known as BlackBerry OS 7 and isn’t backwards compatible, although this isn’t the new QNX-based platform yet as far as we know.

RIM demonstrated that it has a few more tricks up its sleeve, by announcing a new version of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that can manage fleets of iOS and Android devices as well as BlackBerries.

Not surprisingly, after Apple and Android were caught collecting enormous volumes of user location data, it turns out Windows Phone does it as well. As a result of the whole affair, Verizon Wireless wants to put a health warning sticker on every smartphone it ships advising you that it could be spying on you and to consult the user manual for advice on how to turn it off.

It could end up like cigarette packets, although how you’d implement that remains unclear. Perhaps a picture of a typical user at the moment a really creepy targeted advert leaps out at them (well discussed here)?

Microsoft’s Q3 numbers are out and everyone noticed that consumer PC shipments fell 8%, with netbooks off 40%.

If Microsoft was the iconic company of the PC years, ARM Holdings would be the one of the embedded and mobile future. If anyone outside the trade had any idea it existed. Their Q1 is in, with revenues surging 30% and margins over 40% as the world fills up with ARM-powered smartphones, tablets, TVs, STBs, cars, you name it.

CNET’s new The Social blog, for which they hired Caroline McCarthy away from Google, reports on a new blog which is trying to come up with new features for Facebook. What strikes us, so far, is that quite a few could be implemented with something like Greasemonkey, purely on the user side (you could call it Acebook, but you won’t make any money), and quite a few others (drag-and-drop group chat) already exist in Skype. Voice, after all, is the original social application.

Thanks to the wide range of voice APIs that are now available, meet OpenVoice, an open-source clone of Google Voice that provides a hackable API and full SIP support. There’s some detail here, with links to the code. So far it uses Tropo for the voice back-end, but the developers want to make it possible to hook up any media server and any carrier.

Should you trust SSDs with your data? Jeff Atwood says you shouldn’t, because the failure rate seems to be terrible, but that they’re so fast it’s worth it.

High Scalability makes the excellent point that the real opportunity to compete in the cloud is the admin process involved in building, deploying, managing, and shutting down your systems. Amazon knows this (see CloudFormation). Also in the cloud, Data Center Knowledge reports on Cisco’s new containerised data centre.